Wolfgang Schwarz

Conceptual vs. Linguistic Analysis

Philosophers like to paraphrase away ontological or ideological commitment: how can there be a lack of wine if there are no such entities as lacks? Because "there is a lack of wine" is only a loose way of saying "there is not enough wine".

So do we suggest that "there is not enough wine" somehow gives the underlying logical form or linguistic structure of "there is a lack of wine"? One might think so: if there are no lacks, we can't honestly use lacks as semantic values in our linguistic theory. So if 1) our linguistic theory says that sentences of the form "there is an F" are true iff the relevant semantic value of "F" is non-empty, and if 2) "there is a lack of wine" has the form "there is an F", and if 3) the members of a predicate's semantic value are things that (in some intuitive sense) satisfy the predicate, then, given the truth of "there is a lack of wine", it follows that there are things satisfying "is a lack of wine". Which presumably we wanted to deny. Rejecting (2) seems to be a good way to block the argument: "there is a lack of wine" is not really a sentence of the form "there is an F"; really, it is a sentence of the form "there is not enough G".

Nevertheless, I believe this interpretation of philosophical paraphrases is misguided. When philosophers paraphrase sentences, they usually do not put forward linguistic hypotheses. Rather, they do exactly what they appear to do: they propose a different way of saying something. The proposal succeeds if the original sentence and the paraphrase have the same truth conditions, or if they somehow 'amount to the same thing'. (They need not be strictly synonymous.) On this understanding, philosophical paraphrase is symmetrical: if A is a paraphrase of B, then B is a paraphrase of A. By contrast, "A is the underlying form of B" clearly isn't symmetrical. Moreover, for any sentence A, "A and A" is a successful paraphrase, but it hardly qualifies as a serious linguistic analysis.

The point of philosophical paraphrase is reductionist. We believe that all truths can be accounted for on a nice, small and perspicuous basis of fundamental truths. Thus many of us believe that there are no primitive truths about what obtains in a given fiction. To show this, truths of the form "in fiction F, A" should be paraphrased, or analysed, in other terms, perhaps in terms of counterfactuals. These in turn might be analysed in terms of similarity relations between worlds. Taking both steps together, "in the Sherlock Holmes stories, the Russell's viper can climb ropes" could get paraphrased as something like "among all worlds where the Sherlock Holmes stories are told as known fact, some world in which the Russell's viper can climb ropes is more similar to our world than any in which the Russell's viper can't climb ropes".

But it would be insane to suggest that this is the underlying linguistic form of "in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Russell's viper can climb ropes". (It would be equally absurd to suggest that we ought to replace the common expressions with their roundabout analyses.)

When descriptivists suggests that names can be analysed away in favour of descriptions, they claim that for any sentence involving a name, there is a paraphrase in which the name has been replaced by a description. But they usually do not claim that names are somehow really just abbreviated descriptions (as Kripke wrongly believed Russell to have believed).

Unfortunately, philosophers sometimes conflate linguistic and philosophical (or conceptual) analysis. For example, it is sometimes argued that various forms of contextualism about knowledge or morality or whatever are implausible because the relevant sentences about knowledge etc. do not contain 'hidden indexicals'. But if the contextual position was meant as a philosophical, as opposed to linguistic, analysis, this seems to be besides the point.

For another example, what exactly is the first horn of Benacerraf's dilemma? Is it that we have to provide a non-obvious semantics for mathematical statements, or is it that we have to claim that our mathematical statements can be paraphrased in some non-obvious way? I think it's the latter. Deductivism is implausible not because the linguistic form of "2+2=4" is not a conditional -- how can we be so sure about that? isn't that a question for linguistics to answer? --, but rather because it's implausible that when saying "2+2=4", people really only say that "2+2=4" follows from the Peano Axioms.

I don't mean that linguistic considerations are entirely irrelevant to philosophical analyses, or rather to philosophical positions that motivate a philosophical analysis. As illustrated above with "lack", philosophical positions may have consequences for semantics, so by modus tollens, semantics bears on the philosophical positions. My point is only that an argument -- like the one about "lack" -- is needed to draw philosophical conclusions from linguistic considerations about underlying forms etc. Thus one might argue that if talk about knowledge were context-dependent, an adequate semantics for it would have such-and-such undesirable or implausible features. Merely pointing out that a proposed philosophical analysis is not plausible as a linguistic analysis doesn't suffice.

(Should, conversely, a linguistic analysis always be regarded as a philosophical analysis? In a sense, yes: if linguists tell us that the underlying form of some sentence A is given by a sentence B, then presumably A and B say the same in the vague sense required for philosophical analysis. But should we also conclude that B is more fundamental than A, closer to the ultimate, simple basis of all truths? I'm not sure. Suppose our semantics assigns extensions -- sets of n-tuples -- to predicates. By set theory and mereology, there is no set of all ordered pairs <x,y> such that x is a part of y. So our semantics may offer a paraphrase of part-talk on which "part" does not come out as a (two-place) predicate. It wouldn't follow, I think, that philosophers ought to abandon fundamental "part" predications, and also analyse parthood away.)